Jade
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Initially, the group shared about our internship experiences and a topic that was constantly mentioned was ‘Manpower’. My group talked about how often we had to go to different classes to relief the teachers and the challenges we faced when we were left alone with the class. In addition, we had a few colleagues in our respective centres who were thinking of changing sectors. Hence, we decided to do further research on the topic of ‘Manpower’.
My group mates and I had to come up with a suitable inquiry question in which the process was rather repetitive as we constantly had to change the inquiry question. During my research, I had to find out reasons as to why teachers were leaving the sector and why was manpower constantly low in the majority of the centres. However, having to find relevant yet credible sources was not easy. I sieved through my findings and was able to find sources that could support our ideas.
As I carried out the assignment with my group, we had to come up with appropriate interview questions for the principal. Throughout this process, I learnt that the order and phrasing of questions were very important so as to not confuse the interviewee and allow a smooth interview. I learnt how to code responses and categorise them into common themes. By doing so, I was able to identify the centre’s need more easily. Hence, the need of the centre we identified was 'Staff Relationship’.
Jaime
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During lectures and tutorials, my lecturer gave us a head start on what we need to research on this assignment. Our classmates discussed on the various topics such as manpower, parental involvement, burnout etc. Afterwards, we grouped ourselves according to the topic we wanted to research on and finally, manpower is the topic my group is working on. From this topic, I had to search on areas such as the causes and effects of manpower. During the process, there were difficulties looking for credible sources or statistics to support our evidences we found from the Early Childhood Sector in Singapore. However, my group overcame these difficulties by asking professionals around us such as principals and teachers to get to learn more about manpower issues.
Grace
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From my experience as an intern, I have noticed the constant practice where teachers and interns alike are required to move across bays to help with other classes, sometimes even across neighbouring centres. Say a teacher happens to have a lesson she planned to implement that day, she would have to sacrifice her class time and push back the lesson to the following day or week. Looking into the root of these issues, these experiences have made the topic 'Manpower' intriguing for me. When my group and I first started our research, we had the idea that the heavy workload and lack of monetary benefits were the main causes of turnover rates, hence the issue of manpower in the Early Childhood sector. We did make it a point to maintain a neutral stand despite, as we came up with interview questions for our interview with the centre principal.
Through the interview and needs assessment, I came to realise that while the factors I have listed above contribute to the causes, the ability to maintain positive staff relationship in each and every centre is the greatest contributing factor to staff retention. Being an industry that is very interpersonal, when one is constantly experiencing tension with her leader, colleagues and/or parents, it would only be natural for her to want to leave. Such cases would result in the difficulty of retaining these experienced early childhood practitioners. We came together and identified 'staff relationship' as the need of this centre. There was also a period of uncertainty and confusion when we had to change the direction of our project accordingly, but we managed to come together to discuss and plan a proposal tailored to the centre and its needs.
Asylah
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When I first embarked on the Capstone Project, I was interested in finding out regarding the Manpower issue that I faced during my internship. Based on my internship experience, I felt that there was a frequent use of relief teachers and majority of the time, the relief teachers increased the workload instead of reducing it. This was due to the fact that they were unfamiliar with the class routines and needed constant guidance.
I narrowed it down to the topic of Manpower and started researching on it. The planning process was tedious as I had to draft out multiple inquiry questions and I personally felt that constructing the question was challenging. Each time we thought that we came up with a suitable inquiry question, we were told that out inquiry question had to more specific. During that point, I realized that we had to find the root of the issue and slowly form an inquiry question based on our broad topic. However, I managed to grasp the concept of forming the inquiry question and came up with “What are the factors causing preschool teachers to leave the early childhood sector?”.
Initially I thought that manpower was directly caused by ‘burnout’ and this limited my perspective of the broader issue. So, I had to rethink and see the other possibilities. As we began our research with an interview with the centre’s principal and found out that they had a need of building better staff relationship and this also was linked to our topic of Manpower. Apparently, staff relationship could lead to many other issues such as heavy workload, poor communication and at the end of the day, affect the support for each other. I discovered more than what I knew at the start of this Capstone Project.
The Capstone Project has definitely changed my perspective on certain issues based on this topic. I would never have thought that staff relationship could have such a heavy weightage in maintaining them in the sector. I assumed that incentives and heavy workloads was the main reason educators leave the early childhood sector. However, after finding out more from the principal and the other teachers, I realized that effective communication and being able to trust one another is crucial in the industry because at the end of the day sharing teaching practices helps them build on each other’s skills as an educator.
Shannon
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At the start of the module, my lecturer asked us to think about topics that we would be interested to research on. I went back and reflected on some things that happened during my internship. I wrote down a list of things I did not mind researching on. This includes on manpower, stress and low retention of teachers. When I went back to school, my lecturer made us group with people that had a similar choice and asked us to share with one another our views. The group of people I sat with were discussing on the issue of manpower. Based on my internship experience, I concluded that heavy workload was a major factor that contributed to the issue of manpower. From this broad topic, we had to identify areas we wanted to research on. I was confused at first as it was a very big topic but I managed to categorise different parts my research into; causes affecting manpower and effects due to the lack of manpower.
During the research process, my group conducted an interview with a centre Principal and we started off by asking if the centre faced the issue of manpower. The Principal responded with a, "Yes" and we proceeded by asking her what were her views on the causes causing the issue of manpower. I added to my question 'heavy workload' as a factor that might be a cause but to my horror, she said that heavy workload was not a cause to the issue. She added on by saying that every industry and job has heavy workload, but the cause of the lack of manpower came from teachers being unable to manage their time well. After hearing what the Principal said, I realised that I had a misconception that heavy workload was a factor. Instead, I should have looked at how educators deal with their workload and other factors which finally draws a conclusion to different factors causing a lack of manpower.